How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap | WIREDEccentric billionaires are tough to impress, so their minions must always think big when handed vague assignments. Ross Perot’s staffers did just that in 2006, when their boss declared that he wanted to decorate his Plano, Texas, headquarters with relics from computing history. Aware that a few measly Apple I’s and Altair 880’s wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a former presidential candidate, Perot’s people decided to acquire a more singular prize: a big chunk of ENIAC, the “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.”

Fossil hunters unearth galloping, dinosaur-eating crocodiles in Sahara | Science | The GuardianFossil hunters have uncovered the remains of primitive crocodiles that "galloped" on land and patrolled the broad rivers that coursed through north Africa one hundred million years ago. The skeletons of five creatures that walked with dinosaurs – and ate them – were unearthed in remote and rocky regions of what are now Morocco and Niger during a series of expeditions in the Sahara desert.

Hillary Clinton’s 11th-hour diplomacyImagine you are Benjamin Netanyahu and you would know you really, really messed up. And then, all of a sudden, along comes Hillary Clinton, courtesy of a Jeffrey Goldberg interview in the Atlantic magazine, riding like the Fifth Cavalry to the rescue, signaling virtually uncritical support for Netanyahu’s war and the way he fought it – civilian deaths and all – pouring blame on the heads of Hamas, Islamic terrorism and European anti-semitism and giving Netanyahu the green light, should she succeed Obama, to demand ongoing control of security in the West Bank.

The Book of Enoch as the Background to 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude | Is That in the Bible?Although the quotation of 1 Enoch in Jude 14–15 is often noted, the complex dependencies between 1 Enoch, Jude, and the Petrine epistles, as well as the general importance of the theology of 1 Enoch in the New Testament, often go under-appreciated. Taking a closer look at these books provides some insight into how early Christian authors adapted each others’ work and drew upon texts that were ultimately omitted from the Bible.

Ambient space sounds playlistFrom YouTube, a playlist of 12- and 24-hour-long videos of ambient space noise, mostly of the sounds of spaceships like the Tardis, the USS Enterprise, and the Nostromo (from Alien).

How to Fix ItEnding this war in Gaza begins with recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political actor.

Why working-class people vote conservative | Society | The GuardianWhy on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate? This question has obsessed the American left since Ronald Reagan first captured the votes of so many union members, farmers, urban Catholics and other relatively powerless people – the so-called "Reagan Democrats". Isn't the Republican party the party of big business? Don't the Democrats stand up for the little guy, and try to redistribute the wealth downwards?

It was not clear why 13,620 Russians decided to ask Putin's opinion of the awakening of Cthulhu, a fictional octopus-like creature sleeping at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean invented by novelist H.P Lovecraft.

Citation Needed – blarg?I’ve spent far more effort than is sensible this month crawling down a rabbit hole disguised, as they often are, as a straightforward question: why do programmers start counting at zero?

Rocky MorphologyIt wouldn’t be a Rocky movie without an epic montage, a good and bloody fight, oh and some dialogue, too. There are, in fact, only a few basic narrative elements that make up the formula for all six Rocky films. Using empirical data collection (i.e. watching the six movies over six days straight), Rocky Morphology analyzes the Rocky series in order to identify its key narrative elements.

Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore, “Inscribing Bodies, Inscribing the Future: Gender, Sex, and Reproduction in Outer Space”Heerlijke satire of dieptriestige niet-satire? You decide! "Female bodies are constructed against a backdrop in which male bodies are accepted as the norm, an inscription process shaped by the masculine context of space travel. More explicitly, space travel can be interpreted as a historically masculine project in that rocket design has in some ways modeled male anatomy. Space flight, in our reading, becomes the realization of penetration and colonization fantasies about the future. This spirit of masculinity permeates almost all aspects of the space program including long-term political goals, engineering designs, assumptions about crew behavior, and life-sciences research protocols. The masculine "nature" of space flight creates an institutional and ideological framework within which women not only are excluded but also are configured as highly problematic by virtue of their gender, bodies, sexualities, and reproductive capacities. Female bodies thus become the target of a range of practices within NASA aimed at reconfiguring women to fit into the space program."

www.gootechnologies.comWhether you're a designer who likes creative freedom, or a hardcore coder pushing the limits of the web, Goo gives you the tools to create amazing web visuals in your own way and without limitations. Goo Create and Goo Engine are specially designed to make your creation process as simple and smooth as possible without any compromise on performance and functionality.

Search engine optimization: starter guideThis document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

Pattern Library | MailChimpOur pattern library is both a learning tool and a compass that corrects our course as we build new things. We share our work here to help others on a similar path.

12 bizarre cat-related patents – The WeekTo visit Google's patent website is to lose yourself in a black hole of totally weird wannabe inventions — a surprising number of which are for your feline friends. From toys meant to encourage exercise to systems that deliver live birds for food, here are 12 really weird cat patents.

coaltrace/This is a simulation of the basic demographic / genealogical process. Individuals are born and individuals die. This causes lineages to branch and to disappear, and causes the population to share a common ancestor at some time in the past. The coalescent provides a mathematical description of these patterns of ancestry.

KeeperRLKeeperRL is a Dungeon Keeper remake in roguelike style. You can build your dungeon in real time, and possessing a minion turns the game into a classic roguelike.

Statistics Done Wrong — Statistics Done WrongStatistics Done Wrong is a guide to the most popular statistical errors and slip-ups committed by scientists every day, in the lab and in peer-reviewed journals. Many of the errors are prevalent in vast swathes of the published literature, casting doubt on the findings of thousands of papers. Statistics Done Wrong assumes no prior knowledge of statistics, so you can read it before your first statistics course or after thirty years of scientific practice.

Be Obsessed With Something – collegefeed blogWith the graduating class of 2014 back on campus – with one eye on their classes and the other on what comes next – many are starting to seek out advice on how to start their careers. The question on everyone’s mind, whether graduating or not, is What should I be doing to set myself up for a great career ? Here’s my answer: Be obsessed with something.

Gmail, Mavericks, and Mail.app apparently suck together – Marco.orgIt’s pretty bad that Apple didn’t catch this in beta testing — it is, after all, a pretty big set of new bugs with the system’s email client when configured for one of the world’s most popular email services. That’s on Apple, fair and square. But if you’re a Gmail user and expecting to wedge it into an IMAP client without ever hitting problems, that’s increasingly your problem.

Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms | Smart NewsFrom around 420 to 350 million years ago, when land plants were still the relatively new kids on the evolutionary block and “the tallest trees stood just a few feet high,” giant spires of life poked from the Earth. “The ancient organism boasted trunks up to 24 feet (8 meters) high and as wide as three feet (one meter),” said National Geographic in 2007. With the help of a fossil dug up in Saudi Arabia scientists finally figured out what the giant creature was: a fungus. (We think.)

James Deen – BrightestYoungThings – DCA few hours later I received an email from his model coordinator letting me know I was oh-so-adorable and if it wasn’t too last minute could I pop up to New York next weekend to shoot some porn y’all! That’s when I realized we were actually talking about porn here. I went back and forth, listing the usual pros and cons: Pro: Porn! Con: Porn.

Système DYou can tell you've got your competitors rattled when they start producing knocking copy about you. It's a testament to the success of OpenStreetMap that TomTom, the troubled, declining manufacturer of satnavs (PNDs) and geodata vendor, has published a rather cynical example of FUD about "open-source maps".

Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet via reddit.comThis is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Redheads feel a different kind of pain | ScienceNordicCatherin Tate vindicated! Redheads have a reputation for being feistier than others, and there may be some truth in this. Scientists are gradually piecing together a picture which seems to indicate that redheads are constituted differently to other people.

Santiago CARUSO – IllustratorSantiago Caruso is an Illustrator from Buenos Aires who sometimes refers to himself as a graphic journalist. He has illustrated books and both album and book covers.

Coilhouse » Blog Archive » “SOLIPSIST” by Andrew HuangMany of us remember Andrew Huang‘s DIY sci-fi short, “Doll Face“, which went viral on YouTube in 2007, boosting the USC graduate’s professional career. Huang’s most recent work, this short film called “SOLIPSIST“, is nothing short of a vibrant, sensual revelation. It earned the multi-disciplinary artist and his team the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at Slamdance 2012.

Aggravure III: A Mural Using 450,000 Staples | ColossalAggravure is an ongoing series of large wall installations by Baptiste Debombourg. His latest, Aggravure III, was inspired by drawings from 16th century engravers Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Harmensz, Cherubino Alberti and utilizes nearly a half million metal staples tacked to a wall, taking 340 hours to complete.

24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly IndeedThere are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.

Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its serversUpon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands.

The Fireplace Delusion : Sam HarrisThe case against burning wood is every bit as clear as the case against smoking cigarettes. Indeed, it is even clearer, because when you light a fire, you needlessly poison the air that everyone around you for miles must breathe. Even if you reject every intrusion of the “nanny state,” you should agree that the recreational burning of wood is unethical and should be illegal, especially in urban areas.

Top five regrets of the dying | Life and style | guardian.co.ukBronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

The Real Story Behind Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign – ForbesIn writing this story, I’ve drawn from handwritten, dated creative journals I’ve diligently chronicled throughout my agency career as well as files I saved from the 1997 Apple time period (being a packrat often proves useful). In these journals are countless pages of notes and concepts I jotted down during the process of trying to bring Apple back to prominence. I also found the original “To the crazy ones” television script I presented to Jobs, as well as a plethora of rough drafts.

While I’ve seen a few inaccurate articles and comments floating around the Internet about how the legendary “Think Different” campaign was conceived, what prompted me to share this inside account was Walter Isaacson’s recent, best-selling biography on Steve Jobs. In his book, Isaacson incorrectly suggests Jobs created and wrote much of the “To the crazy ones” launch commercial. To me, this is a case of revisionist history.

The Ark In Space: Manul – the Cat that Time ForgotHave you ever wanted to take a trip through time to see what animals looked like millions of years ago? When it comes to cats there is little or no need. This beautiful specimen is a Manul, otherwise known as Pallas’s Cat. About twelve million years ago it was one of the first two modern cats to evolve and it hasn’t changed since. The other species, Martelli’s Cat, is extinct so what you are looking at here is a unique window in to the past of modern cats.